Venti to Put 130+ Driverless Yard Trucks Across Eight US Rail Sites by 2027

A Class I intermodal railroad plans to deploy more than 130 driverless trucks from Venti Technologies across eight US sites by 2027, with the fleet potentially passing 600 units by the end of the decade. The US trucks have not started work yet. Neither company has named the railroad or disclosed financial terms.

Venti, based in Boston, spent nearly three years running autonomous container trucks at PSA's port in Singapore. That operation runs in one big loop, so the trucks never had to back up. US rail yards demanded more.

Founder and CEO Heidi Wyle told FreightWaves the company had to teach its trucks two new skills for the American market: reversing articulated rigs and crossing live track.

"So now when we came to the US, we had to teach our big 60-foot-long tractor-trailer vehicles how to back up," Wyle said. "We have videos of them actually backing up with 4-inch clearance on either side."

Backing an articulated rig ranks among trucking's hardest maneuvers. FreightWaves made the same point in 2022, when Outrider added autonomous trailer backing to its distribution-yard tractors.

Where do the trucks fit in an intermodal yard?

At an intermodal terminal, hostlers shuttle containers trackside or to storage. That trackside shuttle work is what the railroad wants Venti's trucks to take on, Wyle said.

The labor case is blunt. Wyle put monthly driver turnover at some locations around 20%.

"If you ask where is it that people don't want to be, it's in Texas in July, right?" she said. "What they want us to do is to be trackside with the trains and have the vehicles do the unloading and the short hauls."

The trucks also navigate live rail crossings on their own.

"Our vehicle now sees trains," Wyle said. "It's just like you or I. They would see the sign come down. We see lights, red lights, green lights just like humans do."

Venti's Oct. 1 release says the trucks will load, move and unload containers during live yard operations with nobody in the cab and no dedicated lanes. The release does not say whether human hostlers will keep working alongside them at the US sites.

How did the deal come together?

The agreement grew out of a three-month proof of concept. Six weeks in, the railroad told Venti it had hit all the metrics, Wyle said. It then took two vehicles before committing to a broader rollout.

Venti signed a long-term commercial agreement in July, starting at two of the railroad's busiest US intermodal facilities. The July 8 release projected "100-plus" trucks by 2027. The October release raised that to more than 130, and said the fleet could exceed 600 by 2030.

Funding behind the push: Venti raised a $28.8 million Series A in March 2023, led by LG Technology Ventures.

What has Singapore proven?

Wyle co-founded Venti in 2018 with Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Their first idea, slow-speed robotaxis for senior communities, died quickly.

"That was a very bad market because they don't have a lot of money and what they have they don't want to part with," Wyle said.

PSA, which operates more than 70 deepsea, rail and inland terminals per its January release, pulled Venti into logistics around 2020. The two mapped PSA's Singapore port together, and the fleet grew from one truck to two, four, then eight. Venti now runs a 30-truck driverless fleet in Asia.

At PSA Singapore, those trucks work beside roughly 1,200 human-driven trucks. The company says its fleet has logged more than 500,000 autonomous miles and moved more than 360,000 containers.

Could autonomy reshape the yards themselves?

Wyle frames the bigger payoff as predictability. In today's intermodal yards, chassis get dropped wherever there's room, and owners sometimes send drones to find them, she said.

"Autonomy, our trucks are going to be exactly at a place exactly when they're supposed to be there," Wyle said. "It enables a complete redo of all of those yards and the core supply chain."

The railroad wants to start that work, she said: "One of the things they want to do is actually start rebuilding the supply chain yards so that they're less chaotic and more controlled."

Venti is part of a growing group of autonomous technology providers targeting yard and terminal work outside the middle-mile and long-haul lane. Whether the US fleet matches Singapore's 500,000-mile record will become clear once operations begin.